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Sometimes in the history of this blog, design ethics has bled into business ethics. It’s easy for this to happen, because design and business are so closely tied. Almost all design is undertaken for commercial purposes, and this means that business requirements are inherent in almost any design project. Because of the unfortunate character of business, though, these requirements are often unethical. Therefore, it has seemed natural for us in the past to suggest that ethical design meant either taking on only clients with highly ethical businesses (call this the Tibor Kalman approach) or else advocating for more ethical business practices with the clients we do have.

The big problem is that neither of these approaches is feasible for most working designers. The first case is untenable because (as of now) there just aren’t enough ethical businesses to go around, and so most designers wouldn’t have the option to practice ethically. This would mean that for most of us, the choice would be between an unethical practice or no practice at all.

In the second case, designers overstep their roles in their engagements. Our clients aren’t paying us to audit their business practices, and overwhelmingly often, they’re not interested in getting that service from us pro bono, either.

Detail from Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Proserpina (c. 1630).

Douglas S. Sherwin, in his “The Ethical Roots of the Business System” puts a fine point on the reality of our corporate clients, and one worth committing to memory: corporations are incapable of having values that go beyond the values that connect with their societally assigned roles.

Folks who watched the documentary The Corporation will recognize something like this sentiment. In fact, that film shows us that in one very substantive way, those societally assigned roles are incredibly clear-cut: they are the laws of our contry. (At least if you are from the USA. Otherwise, filling the resultant gap in the argument is left as an exercise to the reader. I do not expect it to be difficult.)

All publicly traded corporations [are] required by law to place the financial interests of their owners above competing interests…the corporation is legally bound to but its bottom line ahead of everything else, even the public good.

This means that designers should stop expecting corporations to instantiate the values in the way that we expect from other citizens, and that — even worse — the fact that we ever expected them to in the first place is most likely our own fault. After all, it was us — designers, advertisers, marketers — who effected the strategic shift into bullsh*t mode in the first place.

Now take heed. Although corporations are profoundly and indeed legally amoral (it is Sherwin’s point precisely that corporations cannot ethically instantiate values beyond those of their societal mandate), designers are not. If that fact seems too obvious to merit explicit consideration, consider that the current state of the advertising industry is a direct result of designers fully identifying with their clients’ values at the expense of their own.

In the case that a designer cannot approve of her client’s values, though, neither can she — in her status as a professional — afford to explicitly disapprove of them. But if her position relative to the clients who pay her salary cannot allow her to explicitly judge them (in most cases; in some obvious cases, she will), whither ethical design?

I suggest that the foundation of ethical design should be practically understood as nothing more than transparency relative to the business practice that enables it. This means that whatever additional ethical mandates one insists on, it is always the case that your fellow members of society can directly and without interference audit corporations and their products on their own merits, and therefore engage fairly with them on whatever terms they feel appropriate.

If solutions can be designed such that a given corporation thrives under these conditions, so be it. If they cannot then there is something deeply incompatible between that corporation and our social values, and that is something that we should take very seriously, both as designers and as human beings.

Let’s take stock of our position.

1. We’ve got a practical imperative to help our clients solve their problems.
2. We’ve got an ethical imperative to do so without obfuscating the relevant business practices of these clients.

These two premises yield the notable conclusion that the design problem now facing us is to prove to our clients that transparent solutions can be equal or superior in value to any previously existing bullsh*t solution. Sounds like fun.